@article {1022041, title = {Night-time lights: A global, long term look at links to socio-economic trends}, journal = {PLoS ONE}, volume = {12}, year = {2017}, abstract = {We use a parallelized spatial analytics platform to process the twenty-one year totality of the longest-running time series of night-time lights data{\textemdash}the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) dataset{\textemdash}surpassing the narrower scope of prior studies to assess changes in area lit of countries globally. Doing so allows a retrospective look at the global, long-term relationships between night-time lights and a series of socio-economic indicators. We find the strongest correlations with electricity consumption, CO2 emissions, and GDP, followed by population, CH4 emissions, N2O emissions, poverty (inverse) and F-gas emissions. Relating area lit to electricity consumption shows that while a basic linear model provides a good statistical fit, regional and temporal trends are found to have a significant impact.}, url = {http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174610\&type=printable}, author = {Jeremy Proville and Daniel Zavala-Araiza and Gernot Wagner} }